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By Chris Scott
Photography by Chris Scott and Steven Vigar
Like many who end up in Taiwan, The Exile was as much pushed away from home as pulled by the allure of the exotic. A failed relationship, his would-be career as a prison guard coming to a close after less than a month of taunting from inmates, and a call from the police informing him that a restraining order had been taken out by his ex-girlfriend, all fueled a burning desire to get as far away from his old life as possible.
A friend from high school had been weaving tales of Taiwan for months: fast money, wild parties, travel, and women. The Exile’s family was sad but supportive, genuinely glad to see him do something daring for a change. They gave him a warm sendoff, full of loving embraces and exhortations to stay in touch. In the weeks after he arrived, he wrote long excited emails describing all manner of strange sights and sounds.
He accepted a job at his friend’s English school, disregarding the warnings about the management. How bad could it be? He immediately fell in love with the kids. Remembering how he had been dragged through lessons at that age, his students’ enthusiasm amazed him. They practically jumped out of their seats to answer his questions. The kids were like instruments in an orchestra, their strings already singing in anticipation. All he had to do was stand at the front of the class and conduct, guiding their energy down the path he chose. This wasn’t work. It was like watching a dance.
But it took him a little while to realize that Taiwanese girls weren’t going to throw themselves at him. He was going to have to try—at least a little. Finally, one Saturday night, after countless smirks and jibes from his friends, he extended an awkward invitation to a girl that he’d danced with a few times. To his surprise she accepted. She wasn’t beautiful by Taiwanese standards, but she had a lithe figure and a captivating grace on the dance floor. They pulled the mattress off his bed and dragged it into the living room and huddled there, under the cool draft of his air conditioner. She was warm and receptive, and far more experienced with this meeting of cultures than he was. He felt almost guilty touching this girl with the small breasts, the slightest flare to her hips, and only a handful of jet-black hairs between her thighs. But from the moment he entered her, or rather, from the moment she consumed him, he felt a door close behind him and knew that there would be no going back.
Around the same time he also discovered the wonders of drugs. At a New Year’s party one of his friends handed him a pink pill. He swallowed it without hesitation. The people around the table looked on and smiled to themselves. Twenty minutes later, his body began to pound in time with the music. Each flash of light bored into his optic nerves, causing them to crackle in his skull. The vibrations threatened to liquefy his intestines so he stumbled, half-blind, to the bathroom and locked himself in a stall, keeping his eyes shut tight in a vain attempt to ignore the vomit-slicked toilet and clumps of used tissue stuck to the floor and walls. After fifteen minutes the hammering on the door seemed much closer, so he opened his eyes and realized that he no longer felt the need to throw up or defecate. He opened the door and suddenly everything made sense. The huge Mickey Mouse gloves worn on the dance floor (hey, didn’t Mickey like to fuck, too?), the insipid techno music that he couldn’t stand just an hour ago, and the knowing glances being passed around the table. He truly felt that he’d found something, like a key; or a universal truth that would change his life forever.
After a year he realized that everything his friend had told him about their employer was true, so he gave them the slip while away on vacation, ignoring their threats to have him blacklisted. He found another school, only marginally better than the first, and got fired after six months. Another, much better school followed, but somewhere along the way he’d lost his magic in the classroom. Instead of guiding his students’ energy, he found himself trying to push them this way or that. It eventually dawned on him that he did not possess any gift for teaching. His first students had been so excited and willing simply because he was something new. Some of them had never even seen a foreigner before, and suddenly they had one of their very own for three hours a week. His new students were older, and had already seen a few foreign teachers come and go. They were certainly polite, and would occasionally crack a joke about him in class, but it seemed they were quietly tolerating rather than embracing him. It was the newness of the experience that had made it so magical in the beginning.
He found himself becoming guilty of the same lassitude. The thrill of bedding Taiwanese women wore off and he found himself only tolerating them, enjoying himself just the first few times that he slept with them. After that, his enthusiasm waned and he searched for another, then another, taking comfort knowing that none of them turned out to be pregnant as they had claimed, nor had any followed through on their threats to kill themselves. From time to time in the daytime haze of exhaust and cigarette smoke he would wonder: “Is this really what I want to commit my life to?” These nagging doubts were easily pushed aside once the weekend rolled around again, but he found himself gritting his teeth more and more, fighting the urge to lash out at some slight at work, or to yell obscenities at the taxi that had just cut him off again.
Approaching a traffic circle one day, late for work again, he decided to run straight through rather than waste the time driving around the outside. As he neared the far side of the traffic circle, he saw a helmetless head racing in from the right. He thought to himself they were probably going to collide if this Scooterboy didn’t shoulder check. As the scooter swung into the lane, they banged together, and the driver gave him a surprised look before skidding to a halt and falling awkwardly to the pavement. The Exile pulled over, rage swelling inside of him. He walked back to where the rider was inspecting his wheels for damage, his knuckles white.
“Why don’t you fucking well look?” he shouted.
Scooterboy looked surprised, then furrowed his brow and shouted something back in Taiwanese, crimson juice turning to foam at the edges of his mouth.
“Fuck you!” The Exile replied.
Scooterboy stepped forwards and pushed The Exile’s chest. He stumbled back a step, and then came forward bringing his right foot up fast, burying the steel toe of his boot into the bottom rib on Scooterboy’s left side. The Exile heard a snapping, like a key turning in a lock, and a door opened wide before him. As blinding white noise began to creep in around the periphery of his vision, he saw his nemesis crumple gasping to the ground. The white noise encroached on his vision, until all he could see was pure, blind white.
He raised his heel and brought it down hard, then again and again, each time harder still. At one point he felt a hand grab him roughly by the shoulder, but he spun and swung hard. With a crack the hand immediately loosened its grip and slid down his stomach. When he turned around again he found his sight had returned, but he was looking down at himself. He watched himself staring, motionless, at what had recently been a man.
When the police arrived, The Exile was sitting on the side of the road, his head in his hands, trying with all his will to picture the faces of his parents, his sister, a friend—anyone that might connect him to another time and place; anything to remind him of who he used to be. Yet no matter how he strained and begged through clenched teeth, all he saw before him was a spreading pool of red, ringed with purest white.
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